San Jose Sharks have had Vancouver Canucks' number all season

VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- The Sharks stuck to generalities Thursday when assessing their hard-fought Game 1 victory over the Vancouver Canucks and what lies ahead Friday night when the series resumes.

"I think we're just two evenly matched teams with a lot of skill," Logan Couture said. "Whoever executes better out there is going to win."

True enough.

But the Sharks have been the team doing the better executing for a while now, not just Wednesday night. Players and coaches say regular-season records should be ignored right now, but the fact is, San Jose has won all four games between the teams in 2013.

Things have a way of balancing out. The Canucks, after all, did oust the Sharks from the Western Conference finals in five games just two years ago. San Jose has a long way to go before avenging that.

But while the Sharks talked only in general terms about whatever edge they may have at the moment, the Canucks did a better job of identifying specific areas where San Jose has been able to gain its advantage.

Canucks coach Alain Vigneault cited San Jose's faceoff success when asked what he would put at the top of his list of things the Sharks have done right against his team this year.

"They play real well when they don't have the puck, and because they're such a good faceoff team, more than 50 percent of the time they're starting with the puck," Vigneault said. "That makes it challenging for any team that plays against them."

Advertisement

The Sharks won 57 percent of the faceoffs in Game 1 and fared even better than that in the regular season, when they had a 59.7 percent success rate.

Canucks captain Henrik Sedin cited the Sharks' ability "to really stick to their program. It doesn't matter if the game is tied or they're up a goal or down a goal. They come at us for 60 minutes, and that's what we need to do tomorrow."

Players also talked about San Jose's ability to move the puck quickly out of its own zone and prevent the Canucks from sustaining offensive pressure.

"I don't think we had one shift in their end for more than 20 seconds -- just in and out, in and out," Sedin said.

Conversely, Canucks left wing Chris Higgins credited the Sharks for foiling Vancouver's efforts to hem San Jose in its defensive zone.

"We couldn't get our forecheck sustained -- they moved the puck well, they moved it quick," Higgins said. "When the passes were there, they were on the tape."

Canucks players acknowledged that the Sharks did outwork them in the third period of Game 1, and San Jose defenseman Dan Boyle said that comes down to individual will.

"Everybody's going to work hard, but it's will," Boyle said. "It's little times in a game or a shift where it's that little extra stride that sometimes you cheat on, and you almost have to mentally remind yourself to not cheat."

In Game 2, he added, "their effort and their will to win is going to be better, so ours needs to be elevated as well."

Television analyst Ray Ferraro of the Canadian sports network TSN -- one of the Sharks' harsher critics at the start of the season -- noticed one other distinction between the teams that worked in San Jose's favor in Game 1.

"I don't know whether it's because Ryane Clowe is gone and Douglas Murray is gone and Brent Burns is up front, but there's a freshness about them for the first time in a long time," Ferraro said before turning his attention to the Canucks. "And there's the risk here of there being some staleness."

Their four-game victory streak over the Canucks in 2013 isn't the only one working in San Jose's favor at the moment. Going back to the 2011 Stanley Cup finals, Vancouver now has lost five consecutive playoff games at home.